Top 5 Reasons Why I’m Switching Back to Windows
I made the switch over to the Mac from Windows well over a year ago. For the most part, I love my white MacBook (Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM), but there are some absolutely infuriating things about it that’s prompted my decision to switch back. Here’s why:
#1: No hard drive LED. I sort of understand Apple’s rationale to not include one — it’s all in the name of sleek and minimalist design, yada yada, and I’ll be the first to say that it looks great — but it’s just not bloody functional. I do an absurd amount of multitasking — Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Excel, FireFox, WinXP running in Parallels — I’ll usually have at least 3 of these running at any one time, which is enough to bring my paltry 2GB MacBook to its knees. And I wouldn’t mind this so much, if I knew that the computer was working hard to complete my requests. But as it stands, I can’t see the hard drive working, so I’m forced to put my ear next to the hard drive to try to determine whether or not I should wait it out, or start force quitting applications, or take a sledgehammer to the thing to end it all. I’m sure I look quite silly when I’m sitting in a coffee shop with the side of my head mashed against my notebook. Heaven forbid that the people around me should think I’m some sort of Apple fanatic giving my Mac a hug.
#2: Firefox sucks on OS X. If you’ve used Firefox on OS X for any period of time, then you know that the spinning beach ball of death is a regular sight. Ok, I know it’s not Apple’s fault, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a reason to switch back to Windows. I’ve tried Safari 2, Safari 3 beta, and Camino, but I keep going back to Firefox despite its issues because I can’t live without the plugins. If someone wrote this Google Bookmarks plug-in for Safari, maybe I would consider using it on a day-to-day basis. And say what you will about Alexa, but as someone whose work involves a lot of SEO, it’s extremely handy to know the Alexa, Quantcast and Compete rankings of the site I’m viewing. Anyone know of an SEO toolbar for Safari?
#3: OS X crashes more. I know I’ll probably get flamed for this bit of blasphemy, but Windows never BSODed on me. Ever. Maybe it helps that I know Windows really well, maybe I got lucky with all of the computers I’ve ever owned, but I never understood why Windows has such a bad rap for BSODs. Maybe it’s a reputation carried over from the days of Windows 98/ME, but ever since the Windows NT kernel, I’ve never had one of my own computers give me the blue screen. I’ve worked on other peoples’ computers that would BSOD, but I could usually fix the problem, be it hardware or software. Again, I realize that I’m fairly technical and I’m not your average Windows user, and maybe my Mac skills are lacking, but still — OS X is supposed to just work, which it doesn’t for me. I get the dark “You must restart your computer” screen probably at least once a month, and for no apparent good reason. Or sometimes the mouse will keep working, but the operating system will otherwise be completely unresponsive. The Force Quit key combo doesn’t always work, either, whereas the Windows “Start” keyboard button or Ctrl-Shift-Esc almost always will. Before you go blaming my hardware, I’ve run every diagnostic and all the hardware components check out fine. I recently did a clean install of Leopard and, while the machine feels faster, it crashes just as often. I don’t think I’m alone, either — it seems like a lot of Mac owners that I’ve talked to has had to take their computer in for servicing at some point. On a side note, I just figured out that having a powered USB hub plugged in causes Leopard to not shut down properly… now that’s just sloppy QA.
#4: I run Windows XP inside Parallels all the time anyway. When I’m designing web pages, I need to know what they look like on 90% of the world’s browsers, and that’s Internet Explorer. Yes, IE sucks, but them’s the breaks. I find it a colossal waste of time and resources to have to run a VM like Parallels just for this. So why not just ditch the Mac and get a Windows box?
#5: The MacBook is loud. The fans just won’t shut up, even when there’s very little CPU load. My home office isn’t that hot — I usually traipse around in a t-shirt and jeans, so it’s no air-conditioned server room, but it’s not the Sahara desert, either. From what I can gather, the single fan in the MacBook runs almost constantly at over 5000RPM with the temperature at 65 degrees Celcius, according to Fan Control. Thanks to Apple’s all-consuming need to make things look nice (see point #1), they decided against the convention of pretty much every other notebook manufacturer in the world of putting large vents at the bottom of the laptop near the component that generates the most heat — the processor. Instead, the only vents on the MacBook are in the back, and not only are they narrow, they’re partly obscured by the LCD hinge. But hey, at least the bottom of the notebook is nice and smooth and shiny. And during the few seconds between the time I pack up my notebook from off the table and put it into my bag, people can see just how smooth and shiny it is.
I’ve completely glossed over all the great things about Macs and OS X — they are aesthetically beautiful, there are no viruses to worry about, and OS X undoubtedly has a superior interface compared to Windows. Microsoft has really made a mess of their UI with Windows Vista and the whole “no toolbar” concept that they’ve got going with IE7 and Office Vista (what the hell were they thinking? Everyone and their grandmothers know the File/Edit/View/etc convention; why make them relearn everything?). At the end of the day, though, I just want to get things done, and with Windows, a stable platform that 90% of the world also uses, I can accomplish that.
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